Now

Updated whenever it stops being true. If you're reading this months later, assume it's stale.

Writing

The second part of the legitimacy essay went out at the start of the month. A third is drafted and probably wrong — it tries to say what repair would actually consist of, and keeps collapsing into a list of things that would be nice.

Also circling a piece on why political vocabulary decays so much faster than technical vocabulary. Not sure yet whether that's an essay or a paragraph pretending to be one.

Reading

Rereading Bernard Williams's Truth and Truthfulness, which I first read too young to get much out of. Slowly through Judith Shklar's Ordinary Vices. See the reading list for the rest.

Thinking about

Whether the distinction between "arguments that persuade" and "arguments that should persuade" can be made precise enough to be useful, or whether it collapses under pressure into a restatement of the disagreement it was meant to resolve.

Also: how much of what looks like political disagreement is really disagreement about how much weight to give to things everyone agrees matter.

Not doing

No podcast. No Substack cross-post. No takes on the news cycle — by the time I've worked out what I think, it's moved on, and I've decided that's a feature.